On the subject of destructive cults a lot of stupid things get written. Here is an Op E. by New Yorks Time Op Ed Columinist Ross Douthat and my response to the times
The Cult Deficit
SEPT. 27, 2014
Ross Douthat
LIKE most children of the Reagan era, I grew up with a steady diet of media warnings about the perils of religious cults — the gurus who lurked in wait for the unwary and confused, offering absolute certainty with the aftertaste of poisoned Kool-Aid. From the 1970s through the 1990s, from Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate, frightening fringe groups and their charismatic leaders seemed like an essential element of the American religious landscape.
Yet we don’t hear nearly as much about them anymore, and it isn’t just that the media have moved on. Some strange experiments have aged into respectability, some sinister ones still flourish, but over all the cult phenomenon feels increasingly antique, like lava lamps and bell bottoms. Spiritual gurus still flourish in our era, of course, but they are generally comforting, vapid, safe — a Joel Osteen rather than a Jim Jones, a Deepak Chopra rather than a David Koresh.
Twice in the last few months I’ve encountered writers taking note of this shift, and both have made a similar (and provocative) point: The decline of cults, while good news for anxious parents of potential devotees, might actually be a worrying sign for Western culture, an indicator not only of religious stagnation but of declining creativity writ large.
The first writer is Philip Jenkins, a prolific religious historian, who argues that the decline in “the number and scale of controversial fringe sects” is both “genuine and epochal,” and something that should worry more mainstream religious believers rather than comfort them. A wild fringe, he suggests, is often a sign of a healthy, vital center, and a religious culture that lacks for charismatic weirdos may lack “a solid core of spiritual activism and inquiry” as well.
The second writer is Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder, venture capitalist and controversialist, who includes an interesting aside about the decline of cults in his new book, “Zero to One” — officially a book of advice to would-be entrepreneurs, but really a treatise on escaping what he regards as the developed world’s 40-year economic, technological and cultural malaise.
The implications of Jenkins’s argument are specific to religion. Cults can be dangerous, even murderous, but they can also be mistreated and misjudged (as Koresh’s followers were, with fatal consequences); moreover, spiritual experiments led by the charismatic and the zealous are essential to religious creativity and fruitful change. From the Franciscans to the Jesuits, groups that looked cultlike to their critics have repeatedly revitalized the Catholic Church, and a similar story can be told about the role of charismatic visionaries in the American experience. (The enduring influence of one of the 19th century’s most despised and feared religious movements, for instance, is the reason the state of Utah now leads the United States on many social indicators.)
Thiel’s argument is broader: Not only religious vitality but the entirety of human innovation, he argues, depends on the belief that there are major secrets left to be uncovered, insights that existing institutions have failed to unlock (or perhaps forgotten), better ways of living that a small group might successfully embrace.
This means that every transformative business enterprise, every radical political movement, every truly innovative project contains some cultish elements and impulses — and the decline of those impulses may be a sign that the innovative spirit itself is on the wane. When “people were more open to the idea that not all knowledge was widely known,” Thiel writes, there was more interest in groups that claimed access to some secret knowledge, or offered some revolutionary vision. But today, many fewer Americans “take unorthodox ideas seriously,” and while this has clear upsides — “fewer crazy cults” — it may also be a sign that “we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.”
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“it’s not just that alternatives — reactionary, radical, religious — to managerial capitalism and social liberalism are no longer much…
Followers of wacko ideas are alive and well within the U.S. No one was aware of either Jim Jones or Heaven’s Gate until masses of their…
Thiel’s view of our overall situation is hotly contested, not surprisingly, on his own Silicon Valley turf. The Internet is cluttered with debates (some friendly, some less so) between Thiel and his peers over whether innovation has actually slowed down, whether recent technological progress is actually as disappointing as he frequently suggests.
But in the intellectual realm, the stagnation he identifies seems readily apparent, since whole swaths of political, ideological and religious terrain that fascinated earlier generations have been mostly written off in ours. As Mark Lilla noted in a recent New Republic essay, it’s not just that alternatives — reactionary, radical, religious — to managerial capitalism and social liberalism are no longer much embraced; it’s that our best and brightest no longer seem to have any sense of why anyone ever found alternatives worth exploring in the first place.
Perhaps the sacrifice is worth it, and a little intellectual stagnation is a reasonable price to pay for fewer cults and Communists.
Or maybe the quest for secrets — material or metaphysical, undiscovered or too-long forgotten — is worth a little extra risk.
My response:
In his Sept. 28 Op-Ed piece, The Cult Deficit, Ross Doutat seems to be arguing that what the world needs now isn’t love, but more cults and specifically, their pot-stirring leaders.
Say it ain’t so, Joe, uh, Ross.
Mr. Douthat’s point seems to be that these cult leaders, outliers in the intellectual gestalt, are the free thinkers that take our society’s ruminations in new, imaginative directions. Without them, we’re stuck in the quagmire of unimaginative, conformist thinking. So some fanatical murder and mayhem is a small price for their beneficial re-emergence.
The author clearly can’t tell the difference between intellectual adventurism and the raving of lunatics. Back in the ‘70s, when we didn’t suffer this dread deficit of cults, exactly how was intellectual discourse advanced by the likes of Charles Manson and Jim Jones? Unless you consider mass murders and suicides the path to a higher consciousness, I’m afraid I don’t get it.
I spent most of my 40-year career as an attorney fighting destructive cults, or totalistic movements, as I prefer to call them, helping people escape from them and suing them for the unimaginable physical and psychological damage they heaped on my clients, whose tales of horror still haunt me after all these years. I, too, was a victim of one of Mr. Douthat’s intellectual pot stirrers, when two acolytes of Charles E. Dederich’s Synanon placed a rather large rattlesnake in my mailbox. Its bite nearly killed me; I didn’t feel intellectually stimulated.
Cults and destructive cults should not be mingled as one. They are separate entities.
Leaders of destructive cults use powerful brainwashing techniques to induce people to abandon their own values and replace them with the leader’s hare-brained ideas. Far from stimulating intellectual discussion, these cults promote conformity, blind obedience and cruelty. They create an “us-versus-them” attitude towards the outside world and consider anyone who questions or criticizes them an enemy.
I have to tell you, if all of that is now gone, I won’t miss it. But don’t fear, Mr. Douthat, cults, or at least, cult-like thinking, will always be with us. It is inflamed by doubt, unrest and frustration. It found a home with the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s and with the spread of Communism in the 1950s, both prime examples of organizations with cult-like thinking.
Finally, Mr. Douthat, I wouldn’t worry too much about a dearth of cults in today’s world. Terrorism stems from cult-like thinking and organizations like ISIS and. Al-Qaeda bear all the signs of a destructive cult. So does the ruling party in North Korea. All those militia guys up in the hills here in the U.S. qualify, too.
And if all else fails, you can petition for Charles Manson’s release.
Paul Morantz
Attorney and author of Escape: My Lifelong War Against Cults
Pacific Palisades, CA
